Avoiding Blurry Custom Icons In macOS Mojave

A common complaint from Mojave users is that when you copy and paste a file icon to create a custom icon for a file or folder, the result is blurry. It turns out that this only happens when the icon image is not square. Convert the image to a square one, or copy a square portion of the image, and the result is crisp and clear.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
Since Mojave came out a lot of people have been complaining that they can't create custom icons. They look blurry! Let me show you an example of what people are experiencing. So here I've got two regular folders. These can be files. It doesn't really matter what they are. I'm going to change the icon in them. Here I have an image file. Right. Actually the icon here, since it is an image file, is showing me the preview of the image. But if I do Command i I can see it's just a standard png icon there. So this has a customized icon because it's an image file. Image files have that special thing where they show you previews.

But if I want to apply this icon to one of these two folders I can open it up. I'll just double click it and open it up in Preview. I can select all, Command A and Command C to copy. Then I'll close that window. As a matter of fact I'll quit Preview altogether. I'll do Command i on this folder here and this is where I should be able to create a custom icon. I'll select the icon there and I will Paste this image and I get a blurry icon. So you can see there how it's blurry and this is what people have been complaining about. So is there a fix?

It turns out there is if you understand what is wrong. I did some experimenting. I found that this only happens if the image isn't perfectly square. Which most images aren't. So if you're using a square image it works just like it did before. So let's make this a square image. Since icons are square anyway so it would be a square image if you like it or not. So we can do this in Preview. You can use another imaged editing app and it might be better. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to Select and I'm going to hold down the Shift key so that it is a perfectly square selection. Then I am going to Copy that square selection.

So I could trim this, you know, and create a new image but I don't need to. As soon as I Copy, I'm ready to go. So now I can go over here. I'm going to select folder 2 here. In folder 2 I'm going to Paste this copied square instead of the entire rectangular image. You can see here I get a very crisp beautiful icon. So all you need to do to make sure you get crisp icons if you're using custom graphics for your icons is make sure the image is square. Either do that in the image editing app that you're using or if it's not square and it's somewhere else that you got it from copy a square section from it in Preview or an image editing app before pasting it in here. You'll be able to get crisp icons in the Finder in Mojave.

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